


talking body

by ozonecologne



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Body Dysphoria, Gen, Sam Winchester-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-12
Updated: 2015-12-12
Packaged: 2018-05-06 06:08:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5405870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ozonecologne/pseuds/ozonecologne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For a short time, his body is all he is. That’s blessedly simple.</p>
            </blockquote>





	talking body

**Author's Note:**

> Sam Winchester study, 4k. Sorry for the jumpy chronology. Title from the Tove Lo song stuck in my head right now.

Dean remembers the exact day that Sam asked him to stop giving him baths. Well, actually, he kind of snapped it at him as he squeezed the bathroom door between the two of them once Dean tried to follow him in. It was their routine – one time on a motel TV Dean heard some sitcom mom nag her son, “And don’t forget to wash behind your ears!” and it kind of caught Dean by surprise because he had no idea he was _supposed_  to do that. And if Dean didn’t know, how the hell would Sammy? So at bath time Dean was always there. It was nice, how Sam was kind of giggly whenever there was enough motel shampoo to make bubbles in the water even though Dean would get his sleeves wet trying to get the kid to _hold still._

“I can do it myself, Dean,” little Sam had informed him with narrowed eyes and a petulant sneer. “I don’t need your help.”

“Yeah right, Sammy. You _still_ have your lunch all over your face,” Dean snorted.

Sam slammed the door in his face and locked it before Dean could shoulder his way past. He stood blinking at the white wood for what felt like years until he forced himself to step back. _Well, shit, I guess the kid’s all grown up now,_ he thought sullenly.

From where he sat on the edge of their shared motel bed, he could hear the shower running.

 

* * *

 

He’s not sure when he became aware of his own body.

Sometimes Dean would look somebody up and down, real slow like he was trying to touch them with just his eyes, and Sam would frown at his brother’s lopsided smile. He didn’t understand what there was to look at, what Dean saw that he couldn’t. When they all crowded into their beds at night watching a movie together on the tiny motel television, John would instruct Sam to close his eyes when two people onscreen started kissing. Or whatever. He told Dean too but Sam was the only one who listened, at least for a little while. There were obviously still things for him to learn about flesh. Strange and secret things that gave all bodies their weight.

He had seen Dean break in every new pair of heavy boots that Winchester men were supposed to wear, hissing as he kicked them off and peeled sticky socks away from an open blister on his heel. He’d sit down on the motel bed and pick the tatters of skin off, flicking them into a trashcan or sometimes just onto the floor. A little blood would sometimes stain his brother’s fingernails, and when Sam asked if it hurt Dean would just smile at him and shake his head. “Nah. Stings a little though. It’s ok, buddy.”

So maybe it was after his first hunt that he'd been made aware, when he started picking at his own blisters. He held the torn pieces of his own skin in his hand, rubbery and thick, and thought, _Huh. This is what I’m made of._ His body's only secret is that it is layers and layers of dead matter over weak, raw, pink. Blood, thick and hot skimming just below the surface.

He discovers that what makes him up and what makes Dean up are very different things. Dean’s body could move faster than his, lift heavier things, reach higher. Sam has to struggle to keep up with his brother’s long steps sometimes when they walk to whatever school they’re attending that month. John’s always snapping at him to keep up. Dean’s legs curve out a little at the knees, but when Sam looks down at his own body in the shower or in a cracked full-length mirror on the back of a borrowed bathroom door, his are straight and skinny. He is bony in places that Dean isn’t. He tries to make a fist in front of his eyes and sees the tiny blue veins poke out on the back of his hand. Why does he have to be so small? Why can't his body carry him?

He doesn’t stay small for long.

He shoots up in high school, stretchstretchstretches until he’s as tall as Dean (much to his brother’s dismay). When he puts his boots on before him in the morning he’s actually  _taller_. What a weird thing, to be _bigger_ than _Dean._

It isn’t actually that great, though. He starts favoring showers instead of baths very quickly after the growth spurt, because most of the time he’s too cramped in the bathtub to reach everywhere. Water sloshes over the side and Dean bitches about having to use their last clean towel to mop up the mess so they don't get mold. Motel beds are suddenly too short, his toes hanging out from under blankets unless he tucks his knees up by his chest, or lies diagonally so that Dean’s clinging to the edge of the mattress. He misjudges distances constantly; one time on a haunting they were walking side by side down the stairs and Sam smacked his head on the landing right in front of them like he hadn't even seen it. Dean had laughed, and Sam had a cut on his forehead that lasted for a few days, a faint bruise that Dean shook his head at whenever he caught it out of the corner of his eye. Even John had snorted when Dean pointed it out.

He’s ashamed to admit that he has bumped his head on the doors of the Impala as he was scrambling in far too many times. Sleeping there is suddenly an act of aerobatics, even though it had been his cradle and his crib and always seemed so big on the inside.

He has to duck lower, he realizes. Ah, of course. He has to squeeze himself smaller so that he can fit in the same places he used to. When they talk to children or witnesses on cases, Sam folds his hands together, hunches his shoulders, tucks his knees in so he doesn’t scare them. He treads more lightly in a very literal sense. It’s just for comfort. It feels better to fit in with things. He hates asking for bigger cups and feeling like an inconvenience just because his hands are bigger than most people's. So he adapts. He molds himself to a world that wasn't built for him.

The first time he unclogs a toilet, the first time he vomits on a hunt (backwoods, wendigo cave), the first time he peels blood-stained bandages from his chest, the first time he wipes his sweaty forehead off on an old t-shirt Sam thinks, _I can’t believe I have all of that inside me._

 

Once Sam is aware of what his body is, he begins to find out what makes it feel good.

His body, he is shocked to discover, has likes and dislikes. Too many McDonalds French fries make his stomach hate him. Strawberries make his tongue itch. He hates the pickles Dean puts on his burgers, but loves the tomatoes. Fish makes him feel sick but chicken doesn’t, mac and cheese is good but Dean somehow always finds a new way to make it taste better, the smell of Sharpie markers is weirdly soothing because it reminds him of the gas they put in the Impala and –

All of this stuff makes Sam run. Like the gas they put in the Impala.

For a little while he thinks of his body as a foreign thing, something he cares for and tries to please. It’s an engine he is responsible for keeping clean. The first time he orders a salad instead of a burger at a diner Dean asks him if he’s feeling all right with a tight brow. He needs to run at full efficiency for this life they lead. He needs to be pure and productive. That is a choice he makes, a feeling he chases. A goal of being to aspire to.

When he washes himself in the shower, his hands feel warmer than the rest of him. He puts one on his chest just to feel it rise and fall, heaving in the steam, and smoothes it back and forth a couple of times, feeling the thin hair that's started to grow there. It feels nice, grounding, like he’s solid, and he doesn’t really understand why his body likes that. It’s just skin to skin. His own. He knows it well and it hasn't ever affected him before. He doesn’t understand why sometimes he tilts his neck to the side like that when he touches lower, what makes his eyelids flutter and his mouth drop open and his toes curl. There’s so much of him that’s unexplored and strange and responsive all the same and how can that be?

He discovers, in time, how it feels to have another body pressed against his. What parts of him fit between other peoples’ (fingers, knees, tongue) and what he has to bend out of the way (elbows, nose, feet). In general, his body likes the way this feels, too. The warm pressure of a hand in his, the soothing scratch of fingers against his scalp, the blinding scorch of an orgasm inside someone else, the wet slide of lips and hot breath against his neck.

(Jess. Jess had treated his body like a soft thing. Like something to be cherished, not just observed and assumed to be sturdy enough to hold up the both of them. Madison. Amelia.)

It’s probably around then when Sam stops seeing his body as a thing he has to feed. A thing he has to learn. This is _him,_ he enjoys the same things his body does. He likes holding hands and kissing and sex because it means intimacy, it means safety, it means love sometimes and just relaxation other times. The way his body feels tells him how his mind feels, so the whole experience is just how _Sam feels_. Sensory input is weird and foreign but it’s so intuitive. He knows when a knife slices against his arm that it’s going to hurt. He knows without trying it that to cut his calf or his shoulder or anywhere else would hurt almost the same way. He can close his eyes and imagine kissing a girl in his English class and knows, instinctively, that he would like it.

His body isn’t a shell. It’s him. It’s how he interacts with life and while it does limit him in some ways, he treasures what it’s growing up to be.

 

He grows his hair long and he keeps it like that. Dean makes fun of him, calls him a girl, as if he doesn’t remember that ridiculous feathery mane he had kept up for a hot second in his early twenties. Sam rolls his eyes every time and punches him in the arm (he can do that now and it will have an effect). He shakes it out of his eyes as he loads a handgun, pushes it back when it sticks to his forehead and they’re hiking through the humid mountains where-the-fuck-ever. John asks why he doesn’t just cut it, Sam, something might grab onto that. Dean snorts and promises to get him an 8-pack of glittery hair scrunchies for his birthday.

Sam rolls his eyes and he glares and he laughs it off, and he doesn’t cut it.

He likes… feeling different for his own sake. Maybe. He learned a long time ago that his body is different from Dean’s and he _knows_ it’s different from John’s, but maybe he just really wants that to be true. Enough that he wants to look different from them without losing who he is. It's his hair, right, so he's the only one allowed to touch it. It's something that's his - he doesn't have a lot of  _things_ that he owns, they weren't allowed to growing up the way they did. Shouldn't something that's his be kept so that it doesn't resemble any body else?

Besides, he likes how it feels when girls run their hands through it. When they tug on it sometimes. He likes how it looks when it fans out behind him, when it curls over his ears.

Dean also begins the alarming trend of wigging out whenever Sam shows any skin. “Jesus, dude, put on a shirt, nobody wants to see that,” he’d grumble, turning his eyes away dramatically from where Sam has emerged from the bathroom in only a towel.

He doesn’t understand Dean’s disgust of him. He looks at other people all the time; Sam  _notices_ that. Why is it only his body that Dean finds abhorrent? Why does he roll his eyes when Sam unbuttons his flannel a little bit at the neck, or rolls up the sleeves, or god forbid wear a pair of shorts on occasion in the summer?

His eighth grade science teacher asks why he has those shallow cuts on his forearms (“blood sacrifices” is not an acceptable answer). A librarian on a college campus they’re investigating takes one look at him and asks what he’s doing wasting his time in here when he could be practicing with the basketball team. Some little girl in pigtails cries and hides behind her mom when he gets too close to her on the bus. Crowley calls him a god damn Moose.

Skin, skin is for hiding. His skin upsets and unnerves. He doesn’t blister now, only calluses. Makes himself rough against the outside world. He’s too huge and that’s not his fault but he's still the only one who has to apologize for it.

So Sam takes Dean’s advice and covers himself in canvas jackets and denim and long sleeves. He makes himself smaller. What was once merely for the sake of others' comfort now begins to feel like a physical burden on his shoulders. Maybe if he shrinks small enough, he can erase the shame his body brings him. He knows he’s a freak for a whole other set of reasons, but it’s starting to show in his face, he thinks. When he gets naked with someone with nice eyes and a wide smile, he will keep the lights off unless they ask him not to. He is not the only one who feels this way about their body – he gets that. He lavishes others the way he wishes he could be lavished, and he does it softly. Respectfully.

It’s funny, later, when he and Dean go hunting on their own and he gets to be an Agent for a day. He puts on a suit and draws himself up to his full height, flashes a badge and a grim nod and other people stay out of his way. He knows what he has to be and how he has to act to get people to give him the space he needs. He can demand it if he wants to.

He doesn’t like the suspicion and the wariness in their eyes when he does that, but he can’t let them know how gentle he really likes to be. They’d never take him seriously, and he’d never be able to do his job.

 

It feels all too familiar when he drinks Ruby’s blood. Not just because he’s had Azazel’s blood in his mouth too, but because the actual feelings are the same. He remembers being a little kid and wanting to be as big and as strong as his dad or Dean. He remembers that same strange mix of fear and awe as he realized how much his body really contained when he pins a demon to a wall using only his will. There’s so much at work inside him. He doesn't ever feel small anymore. There’s so much he wants to make better. To grow. Ruby helps him. She makes him feel good, too, blood and sex together. It’s a high that makes him feel full, even though he always wakes up in the mornings feeling hungrier than he was before.

That was at least his choice in the beginning; Meg was the first to truly take his body from him. She laughs with his mouth, she snarls with his teeth, she makes fists with his hands to punch _his_ family, and he can’t do a goddamn thing about it. It takes him days to get back to normal after that, just opening and closing his hands over and over again until he can convince himself that it’s really him moving and not something else.

Dean gets really old that one time, like Benjamin Button but backwards. Suddenly he can’t eat cheeseburgers or run without wheezing or get women to sleep with him and it’s infuriating. “This thing sucks,” he says, pointing to a wrinkled body that isn’t really his. _Wow, so now you understand_ , Sam can’t help thinking.

Lucifer escalates. Depersonalizes, separates body from Sam as often and as graphically as he can. “Vessel,” he names him. Just a shell to slip into. Empty. A meat puppet. That is what he is to the powers that be.

He hurts and moves Sam in ways that he can only watch and regret and have nightmares about later. They are his hands beating his brother’s face in against the car, they are his eyes watching it happen, but it’s not _him._  He rails so hard against it that he takes back control, opens his hands, dumps the instrument that is him into a hole in the ground so it can’t hurt anyone anymore. But still his body burns and sees things that are not there and wakes itself up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat and hearing fake, empty laughter.

It's betrayal. It's mutiny. It's fucking terrifying.

He grounds himself in the only thing that is real and touchable. He cuts his palm and he squeezes it, hears the grind of his teeth in his jaw and a very real ooze of blood and can take off the bandage later and remember how much is in him again. How much Lucifer cannot take away. He is real and he is here and Lucifer is not.

Soulless, he does feel empty but at least he feels present. For a short time, his body is all he is. That’s blessedly simple.

When he starts the trials, it’s a different feeling of powerlessness than before. It isn’t like possession at all. As he moves from one to the next, he remembers curling over toilets and vomiting up bad seafood, tears collecting in his eyes when he knocks his funny bone against a doorjamb, all the things his body doesn’t like him for. It _curses_  him for this. He can feel it withering and decaying from the inside out. His hands shake. He is tired for longer. His reflexes are slow and Dean ribs him for it. His eyes go blurry sometimes and it scares him because it usually happens when he’s reading or driving or doing something really important and he _can’t control it_. He can’t make it stop, he can’t put enough healthy food or good gasoline into his body to make it run right. It’s _him_ but _not_ at the same time and when has it ever felt like that before? Sam has no frame of reference for how this feels, how it feels to slip away from himself. He just knows he has to keep going.

It’s kind of like when Dean used to tell him that he was singing or mumbling in his sleep. He doesn’t ever remember doing those things, but his body did them for him, like it had a will of its own. It hurts and it wants and it does so without his permission.

So many things keep trying to choke him out of himself. His permission means very little to the world. Not even his own brother could be bothered to care what he would say; angels are let inside to force his body into fixing itself. Azazel, Ruby, Croatoan, all let in by blood to turn him into something he never asked to be. The rabids with their black blood made by literal Darkness, they will come in later too. He will have to burn the very traces of them from his skin.

Gadreel. Kevin. They are side effects and symptoms and reincarnations of this. He still has nightmares about that phantom flare of grace in his palm and the smoking crevices of Kevin's eyes. The resulting waves of nausea, anger, helplessness. Even for someone so big, to feel all that at once is just too much.

His body doesn’t feel like it belongs to him after all these long years of being torn apart. He feels like a wind-up doll and he’s never allowed to forget it.

 

So after all this, after a whole lifetime of getting to know where Sam Winchester The Body fits in, the bunker is. New.

Sam is used to taking showers because he doesn’t fit in motel tubs. Sam is used to sleeping diagonally or curled up and sore in the morning because motel beds are too short and the Impala’s backseat is only so wide. Sam is used to ducking through doorways and hunching over at diner tables so he doesn’t attract attention to himself.

But. Here.

The Men of Letters installed HUGE tubs in their shower room. Dean thinks they were used for storing actual mermaids. Sam doesn’t care what the hell they were used for – they’re long enough for his legs and wide enough that his elbows can rest on either side with a little stretch and deep enough to sink low into the warm water and _damn,_ does that feel nice. His body likes him for that. He feels cleaner than he has in years.

His new bed is the same way. He doesn’t really like memory foam like Dean does – it’s too quiet and still, he likes a little give – but he finds a bed frame and a mattress that’s long enough for him. He can spread out like a happy starfish in his sheets and the first time he _does_ he giggles like a kid. He doesn’t even remember wanting to laugh, his mouth just opens and it punches out of him like a happy surprise.

The doorways are big enough that he doesn’t have to duck. The tables are long enough for his arms. He can find whatever kind of tall chair he wants so he doesn’t have to fold up his legs. This is his kitchen and it is hidden underground far away from anyone who would stare at him when he walks into a room so he doesn’t have to hunch, to fold, to diminish himself. He sits up straight or he slouches or he sprawls and it’s his fucking choice to do so.

Dean still skeeves out when Sam walks down the hallways in just a towel, or missing some article of clothing. He still makes fun of him for going on runs and eating rabbit food and keeping his hair long, but that’s because they’re brothers. There is no shame here, not really. Sometimes Cas even joins him when he does yoga in the library, or snags a few carrot sticks from his plate. This is his home, this is where validation and self-care are allowed to take place, and his body – no, _he_ belongs here.

 

Sam remembers the exact day that he began to forgive God for making him in His image.

It's the day he finds a home to keep him.

**Author's Note:**

> You can also find me [here](http://www.ozonecologne.tumblr.com) on Tumblr. Come talk to me about my favorite Winchester.


End file.
